Posts filed under ‘Community’

We can’t take credit for this one, Brenda introduced us to the idea of a prayer blanket thanks to the ladies at her church who have been doing this for years. Basically, they create a blanket for a specific person who is sick or hurting or just in need of some comfort. The beautiful part is that the time used to make the blanket is spent in prayer for that person. Once completed, the whole church prays a blessing over the blanket & the recipient.

We loved this idea immediately!

It all comes back to that “small things with great love” idea. We can’t fix someone who’s hurting, but we can give them something soft to cuddle with, pray for them, & love them. So that’s what we’ll do! For our first ever prayer quilt we picked out a very dear friend who has been through a lot & we got to work!

The quilt took the look it did for a few reasons:

We don’t all sew. Plus we’re doing this in a coffee shop. So we went with the rag quilt method.

Her favorite color is blue + t shirts are cozy = blue t shirts to make the squares

We loved the embroidered note paper, & we know she loves the song “It Is Well” so that will be our center patch.

A rag quilt is a really easy project but just takes some time. It’s great for families to work on because it’s easy enough for kids (& us!) to make. Cut squares of fabric, snip the edges to make a fray, & try the frays together.

We made 1 ft squares & trimmed the fray every 1″. Try to keep the number of frays even on each square so you have the same number to tie together. You can see we used patterns as well as any shade of blue shirt.

* Note: trim the fray longer than pictured, they were too short to tie

Now we’re at the tying stage, the best part. A few people will be taking the time to sit & pray while we tie hundreds of knots together. Lastly, we’ll get one large piece of fleece to be the back of the blanket, frey the edges, & tie the quilt to the backing. Then we’re finished! We’ll update with a final photo when complete.

Hot Metal Bridge, our home church, is hosting a free Thanksgiving meal from noon to 2pm at 2700 Jane Street (South Side, Pittsburgh). Everyone is invited & welcome, there will be plenty of food and family-friendly activities.

If you read on you’ll see how we’ve been working on centerpieces for this meal for the past 3 weeks. Some of us can’t make it to dinner because of family & travel, but we’re happy to be able to put our hands to work in some small way to serve our community & make the day beautiful. Maybe the idea of crafts as service is lost on some people, but we get it. As Mother Theresa famously said “You can do no great things, only small things with great love” and we’re big fans of Mama T. So maybe this is the smallest of the small, but we’re glad to participate.